


A Lady Who Lingers

by Lady_Ganesh



Category: Annihilation (2018 Garland)
Genre: Alien Biology, F/F, Femslash February, Not Really Character Death, Transformation, Unresolved Romantic Tension, but also Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-10-20 07:37:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17618225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Ganesh/pseuds/Lady_Ganesh
Summary: Dr. Ventress is, and isn't, and is.Title from "Helplessly Hoping," of course.





	A Lady Who Lingers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [track_04](https://archiveofourown.org/users/track_04/gifts).



She'd wanted Lena with her. 

It hadn't been rational, but she'd left rational thinking behind before they'd even ventured into the Shimmer, when she'd decided to make the offer to Lena in the first place. Maybe before then. It was hard to tell now.

The lighthouse was life and death, piled on top of one another like layers in a cake, alien and familiar at once. Unrestrained growth and change. Like cancer.

Lena would have talked about it differently. Would've had the words. Maybe Ventress herself would've had the words, before the Shimmer. Before disease had begun eating her from the inside out.

It was easy to think _it wants me, wants who I am,_ but it couldn't _want._ There was no intelligence to be found. Nothing to communicate with or outsmart. Maybe _want_ was the right word, maybe it wasn't. 

There was a hole in the lighthouse floor. The source.

She descended.

 

The Shimmer was gentler than disease, though still every bit as destructive. She'd felt it running under her skin for miles, but this was something deeper, stronger, like someone had slowly been turning up the volume on the stereo and now the sound was ear-splitting. 

It was going to take her apart.

 _If I was a better leader,_ she thought to herself as she sunk to the ground, _I would be wishing Josie was here, too._ But instead, she let the Shimmer take her, and thought of Lena.

 

There were others in the Shimmer, once she was there. The teams she'd sent, even Kane, who she'd thought had returned. Fragments of thought, being. Josie, Cass, Neil from the last expedition. Garland from the first.

And Lena. Lena-who-was, Lena-who-would-be, Lena walking into the lighthouse and finding what might have been the corpse of her husband. Lena who had let Ventress leave, out of kindness or sorrow, and who was there at the end, the beginning, the end. Was it the end?

Whatever had started this, it was something unlike them at all when it landed, and still alien, incomprehensible. It broke them all down, and kept bits, remnants, echoes. Recognizable now but more jarring for the resemblance.

Ventress thought of the bear and wondered if what remained would keep her voice.

 

It had almost rebuilt her fully when Lena descended. There was something of Ventress left, a warning, an explanation, and Lena had made it, her drive alone letting her keep her self intact, the rest of her team _(every team had self-destructed, every time)_ broken to shards.

Lena's eyes were like honey in darkness.

 

She'd given the assignments, drawn up the missions, sent men into a mystery and waited while nothing happened and no one returned. She'd looked into Kane's eyes and known what he had been longing for. _Self-destruction._ That was what she'd told Lena, long ago.

Now she looked at someone else. Someone made of fragments and echoes. 

She wasn't Ventress any more. But Ventress was part of her now, Cass and Josie and Anya. Some more alive in her than others.

Ventress she could hold close to her heart, if what was still inside her could be called that.

"You aren't Kane," she said. "Are you?"

"I don't think so." She remembered, again, how Kane had ducked her answers when she'd interviewed him. How Kane had known how they'd drifted apart. This man was neither woman's memory, was both, blurred over one another like a rubber stamp that had been pressed to the paper twice. "Are you Lena?"

She didn't know how to answer him. She was, in some fundamental way, but she was also _more._ And also nothing at all.

She held him, and felt the Shimmer move through her.


End file.
